Vodafone Germany to invest €2bn in fibre broadband

Vodafone Germany has announced its plans to invest €2bn in gigabit ultra-fast fibre broadband services by 2021.

With this new investment comes a predicted 13.7 million new gigabit connections for German consumers and enterprises.

Commenting on the project, Hannes Ametsreiter, CEO of Vodafone Germany, said: “I am excited to announce this transformational investment plan for Germany, which will bring Gigabit broadband services to millions of consumers and businesses. The project is consistent with our strategic goal to become a leading converged communications operator in Germany, enabled by a best-in-class Gigabit network infrastructure. I am confident that these largely success-based investments will deliver incremental revenue growth and attractive returns for Vodafone’s shareholders.”

The new plan comprises three new services:

Giga-Business, which follows on from the partnership agreement with Deutsche Glasfaser, a fibre-to-the-premises network in Germany that launched in 2017. Giga-Business is an extension of that, with the aim to reach 100,000 companies in 2,000 business parks by the end of 2021.

The second is Giga-Municipality, which aims to provide gigabit services to approximately one million consumer households in rural areas. The municipality will own and be responsible for building the passive network infrastructure, while Vodafone will operate this network under a long term rental agreement, building the link between the central office and its fibre backbone, deploying the active equipment and paying the connection costs for each household. Build out will begin once a third of the homes in a municipality have committed to buying fibre services.

And lastly there’s Giga-Cable. Through this initiative Vodafone’s cable footprint will be upgraded from 500Mbps to 1Gbps using DOCSIS 3.1 technology for Vodafone’s 12.6 million cable homes.

Vodafone has said that it expects that the investment will drive an uplift of 1-2% in Germany’s service revenue growth, with predicted above average incremental EBITDA margins.